Intergenerational Justice

Do justice considerations apply to intergenerational relations, that
is, to relations between non-contemporaries? If we follow a broad
understanding of justice (see Mill 1969, ch. 5) this is the case if
future or past generations can be viewed as holding legitimate claims
or
rights[1]
against present generations, who in turn stand under correlative
duties to future or past generations. One of the legitimate claims of
future generations vis-à-vis present generations appears to be
a claim of distributive justice: Depending on the understanding of the
relevant principles of distributive justice to be applied, if there is
an intergenerational conflict of interests, present generations may be
obligated by considerations of justice not to pursue policies that
create benefits for themselves but impose costs on those who will live
in the future.

This entry will focus on two questions: first, whether present
generations can be duty-bound because of considerations of justice to
past and future people; and second, whether other moral considerations
should guide those currently alive in relating to both past and future
people. Concerning the first question, the entry will suggest that
present generations have duties of justice to future people but not to
past people. Concerning the second question, the entry will suggest
that present generations also have additional moral duties (duties not
grounded in correlative rights) to future people as well as moral
duties to past people owing, in part, to the rights these people had
while alive.

While we owe to John Rawls the first systematic discussion of
obligations to future people (see Section 4.4), Derek Parfit's work has
defined the problems of how we can and should relate to future people
(see esp. Section 3).

It may seem that considerations of justice do not apply to
intergenerational relations, because there is a lack of reciprocity
between generations of people who are not contemporaries. Among
non-contemporaries, there is no mutual cooperation and there are no
exchanges in kind. This fact about the relations between present and
remote past or future generations is closely related to a second
feature of intergenerational relations: the permanent asymmetry in
power-relation between living people and those who will live in the
future.

First, present generations may be said to exercise power over (remote)
future generations when, for example, they create conditions that make
it costly for future generations to decide against continuing to
pursue present generations' projects. In this way, present generations
effectively manipulate interests of future generations, and can
successfully achieve the intended result of having their projects
continued. Remote future generations cannot exercise such an influence
on presently living people, and in this sense the power-relation
between present generations and remote future generations is radically
asymmetrical: remote future people do not even have the
potential for exercising such power over presently living
people. Analogously, presently living people cannot exercise influence
over past people (Barry 1977, 243-44; Barry 1989, 189).

Second, not only can the present generation influence the conduct of
future people by affecting their desires and circumstances, it can
also exercise power by harming future generations. It can, for
example, pursue a natural-resource policy with long-term negative
consequences. In this case, the present generation risks making future
generations suffer by having their options reduced to an inadequate
range — unless, that is, future generations will have available
to them technologies that allow them to adapt to the circumstances. By
contrast, remote future people cannot at all affect the value of the
lives of the presently living, at least while the latter are
alive. Still, such future people might nevertheless be considered able
to harm or wrong present or past persons insofar as the latter have,
or had, interests with respect to posthumous future states of
affairs. In the same way, the presently living may be morally
constrained in their actions that relate to people who lived in the
remote past (Parfit 1984, part IV; Heyd 1992). These power relations
are quite different from those among contemporaries, which are
relatively fluid and subject to change.

Third, those presently alive can affect the very existence of future
people (whether or not future people will exist), the number of future
people (how many future people will exist), and the identity of future
people (who will exist). In short: future people's existence, number,
and specific identity depend (are contingent) upon currently living
people's decisions and actions. A decision taken by present
generations could conceivably result in the termination of human life;
there is a long tradition of institutionalized population policy whose
goal is to control the size of future generations; and, more
prosaically, a couple can certainly decide whether or not to have
children. Furthermore, many of our decisions have indirect effects on
how many people will live and who they are, for many of our decisions
affect who meets whom and who decides to have children with whom. To
explain such “different people choices”, Parfit adopts the
genetic identity view of personal identity: the identity of a person
is at least in part constituted by the DNA the person has as a result
of which ovum was fertilized by this or that spermatozoon in the
creation of this person. Our actions thus have an effect on the
genetic identity of future people in so far as they affect from which
particular pairs of cells future people will grow — and any
action that affects people's reproductive choices, directly or
indirectly, will do that. Many of our actions in fact have an indirect
effect on when future people will be conceived. If we decide between
two long-term policies regarding use of natural resources, for
example, we know that depending on which we choose, different (and
most likely also a different number of) future people will come into
existence.

By contrast, when we make decisions affecting our contemporaries, we
do not face different people choices. Our decisions may affect their
existence only with respect to their survival; their number only with
respect to how many survive; their identity only in the sense that we
might be in a position to change their conditions of life, character,
and self-understanding. Of course, we can affect neither the number
nor the identity of past generations.

Lastly, our knowledge of the future is limited. While we can know the
particular identities of both previously and presently existing
people, we are normally not in a position to refer to specifically
identifiable future persons. It is not that all predictions about the
future decrease in certainty at some constant rate (see Cowen and
Parfit 1992, 148). Indeed, many predictions are more likely to be
true concerning the further future than the more immediate future. For
example, the prediction that some policy will have changed or that
certain resources will have been exhausted is more likely to be true
in the further future. Nonetheless, we cannot know the specific
identities of persons in the further future.

These differences between our relations to one another and our
relations to subsequent or antecedent generations give rise to the
following important normative problems. First, if and insofar as the
existence, identity, or number of future people depend upon present
decisions and actions, to what extent can the former be said to be
harmed by the latter? Furthermore, can presently existing persons, in
making such decisions, be guided by the interests of future persons?
These are the questions that underlie the so-called
‘Non-Identity-Problem’ (see Sections 3 and 4). Second,
given our limited knowledge of people who will live in the future, how
should we relate to them under conditions of risk and
uncertainty?[2]
Third, is it possible for us to harm past people, and do we have
duties toward them? (See Section 5). Fourth, what motivation could we
have for fulfilling our duties to future people, given that we know
neither their individual identities nor their particular
preferences?[3]

In discussing these questions, we will presuppose a person-affecting
view of ethics, which holds that the moral quality of an action has to
be assessed on the basis of how it affects the interests of
persons. This is a claim about what are the units of moral concern. In
the context of intergenerational justice, the person-affecting view
has the implication that only the rights and interests of actually
existing persons are to be regarded as morally relevant. Those people
who actually exist at some time count; potentially existing people do
not count. The person-affecting view stands in contrast to an
impersonal view according to which the value of states of affairs is
not reducible to their effect on the interests of actual people. The
differences between these positions will come to the fore in
Sections 2.2 and 3.3 on procreational duties.

This entry discusses and defends an interpretation of
intergenerational justice that can be characterized by the following
two sets of claims. First, with respect to the relation between
currently living people and future people the following propositions
are discussed (Sections 2-4): The dependency (or contingency) of the
number and specific identity of future people upon our decisions does
not matter where the question is our potentially harming future
people's interests and violating their rights; considerations of
justice, namely the welfare rights claims of future people
vis-à-vis currently living people can guide us in choosing
among long-term policies; such considerations can also guide
prospective parents in deciding whether they ought to revise their
decision to conceive out of regard for the children they would thereby
beget (Sections 2-3); intergenerational justice will reflect, at least
in part, a sufficientarian conception of justice (Section 4); important concerns
for future generations many people share cannot be understood as
duties of justice vis-à-vis future people; rather they
are based on an understanding of the ethical significance of
understanding ourselves as members of a transgenerational polity and
community (Section 4.5).

Second, with respect to the relations between currently living people
and past people we will investigate the following claims (Section 5):
Currently living people can be understood to be negatively affected by
historical injustices even if these injustices are among the necessary
conditions of their very existence and identity; assuming that the
supersession of injustice is possible we will need to investigate
whether and to what extent it has occurred in any given case; even if
we held the view that the non-identity-problem excluded the
possibility of currently living people being indirect victims of past
injustice or that the historical injustice under consideration has
been superseded, currently living people can stand under surviving
duties to deceased victims owing to the wrongs committed against them
(by others) in the past.

On a person-affecting view, future people count if, and insofar as,
they have interests, just claims, or rights vis-à-vis currently
living people. Some philosophers deny that this can ever be the
case. In addition to an argument reflecting the
‘Non-Identity-Problem’ we can distinguish at least three
further arguments in support of the denial of the possibility of
future people having rights vis-à-vis us. The first argument is
based on the fact that future people will live in the future;
according to the second argument, for future people to have rights
vis-à-vis us we would have to ascribe a right to existence to
them; and, third, our epistemic situation does not allow us to relate
to future people as individuals. We hope to remove these skeptical
doubts before turning to a discussion of the relevance of the
contingency of future people — the subject that, under the title
of the ‘Non-Identity-Problem’ has
been at the core of much of the philosophical inquiry into the
foundations of intergenerational justice (Sections 3-4.3). We will
introduce that core issue by addressing a specific criticism of the
person-affecting view in the context of intergenerational justice
(Section 2.2): Some have argued that a person-affecting view cannot
account for the widely held belief that persons have the right not to
be brought into existence if the person-to-be would not reach a
sufficiently good (or decent) level of well-being.

First, some philosophers have denied that future people can have
rights (or just claims), based simply on the fact that they will live
in the future. Consider the following claim: “Future generations
by definition do not exist now. They cannot now, therefore, be the
present bearer or subject of anything, including rights” (De George
1981, 161; see also Macklin 1981, 151-52). Claiming that we can
violate the rights of future people now does not, however, imply that
future people have rights now (though see Partridge 1990, 54-55, who
suggests that future people have rights in the present). That
implication would hold only if it were conceded that presently
existing rights alone constrain present action. But we can safely
assume, first, that future people will be bearers of rights in the
future, second, that the rights they have will be determined by the
interests they have then, and third, that our present actions and
policies can affect their interests. If we can violate a person's rights by frustrating her interests severely, and if we can so severely frustrate such interests of future people, we can violate their future rights (see Hoerster
1991, 98-102). Their future existence itself is thus insufficient to
ground the claim that we cannot now violate the rights of future
persons.

Second, we are not committed to the claim that if we are able now to
violate the rights of future generations, it is their rights to
existence that we violate. Since it is implausible that
anyone has a right to existence as such, it is implausible
that future persons have rights to existence. Furthermore, when we
prevent someone's existence, we do not thereby harm the hypothetical
interests of this potential subject. Thus, claiming that actual future
people have rights vis-à-vis currently living people now cannot
commit us to claiming that possible future people have a right to
existence.

Are our present actions nonetheless constrained by rights of future
generations that are based on interests other than existence as such,
interests such as subsistence, etc.? This is possible only if
attributing rights to people does not require us to make reference to
individual persons. However, third, lack of particular knowledge of
future people as individuals does not stand in the way of attributing
to them welfare rights, such as a right to
subsistence.[4]

When we consider which natural-resource policy presently living
people ought to adopt, we cannot possibly be guided by obligations to
concrete (genetically identifiable) people living in the (remote)
future. From this fact, however, it does not follow that we have no
obligations to future people. All that follows is that such
obligations do not depend on the particular identity of
future persons. Rather, such obligations would be grounded in the fact
that future persons are human beings; that is, they share those
properties of being human that permit and require us to relate morally
to them as fellow humans. In evaluating a natural-resource policy, we
can safely assume that future people will exist to whom we owe
obligations as human beings — for example, the obligation to
protect their interests in having the means of subsistence. We may
also be able to predict with some accuracy the effects of our present
actions on future generations' means of subsistence. Thus, if we
decide to deplete rather than conserve resources, this will in all
likelihood increase the chances that people do not have the means of
subsistence; if there are rights to subsistence based on humanity
alone, then, those people who will exist under our policies of
depletion are more likely than those who will exist under our policies
of conservation to have such rights violated (assuming here the number
of future people being constant). This would be a rights-based
consideration for not choosing a policy of depletion. As will be shown
in Section 3, the claim that rights considerations can guide us in
choosing among policies or actions that have an impact on the
composition of the future human population relies upon a notion of harm that does not depend upon a comparison of the
state of the supposedly harmed person to a counterfactual state of
this person had the harmful action not occurred.

Can prospective children be said to have an interest that their
parents not act in a way likely to lead to their birth when the
parents are in a position to know that the life of the child, should
it be born, would fall below some relevant threshold of well-being?
(On the significance of the notion of a threshold level of well-being,
see below, Sections 3 and 4). It is a widely held belief that under
certain circumstances prospective parents should refrain from
procreating owing to the predicted plight of the would-be child.

Since the publication of Narveson's seminal paper
“Utilitarianism and New Generations” (Narveson 1967; see
also Narveson 1973; Parfit 1976; Mulgan 2006, ch. 6), many have
contributed to the debate on whether a person-affecting approach can
account for the asymmetry of our procreational duties. The claimed
asymmetry is the following: while prospective parents have no
obligation to procreate out of regard for the interests of possible
future children, they have an obligation not to beget children who are
going to be miserable.

Some have argued that belief in such an asymmetry is incompatible with
a person-affecting view and, more particularly, with the claim that
possible people cannot be said to have, against us, a right to
existence.[5]
It is helpful at this point to make a distinction between the
reasoning of potential parents that involves a possible
future child and reasoning that involves their future child
(see Govier 1979, 111). For instance, in deciding not to procreate at
all people do not thereby harm the children they could have brought
into existence (see sec. 2.1) since these are merely possible
individuals. Thus, much reasoning about whether or not to have a child
should concern the interests of those already alive; it is actual
people's lives that would be affected by whether or not the child
comes into existence (see Heyd 1992, 96-97). Nonetheless, people might
make choices about procreation based on the welfare of their future
child; that is, the welfare of that as yet non-existent individual
would feature in their reasoning. When prospective parents decide in
favor of having a child and now learn that this child, if born,
would have a life that falls below a certain threshold of well-being
they ought to consider the effects of their actions on their child
and might well decide not to have a child after all.[6]

Objections to the asymmetry view presented above concern, in
particular, the claim that after having made a decision to have
children, prospective parents should revise their decision out of
regard for their would-be child(ren) when they learn that the
prospective child(ren) would have a life that falls below the relevant
threshold. Why, under these circumstances, should parents revise their
decision to have children out of regard for the children? The reason
is that they would harm the would-be child, and, thus,
arguably,[7]
would act wrongly toward it. Here, harming their child-to-be would
inflict a wrong on it. When prospective parents learn that their child
would have a life that falls below the relevant threshold, they should
refrain from having it, for by bringing the child into existence they
would cause harm to it. In bringing about a child's existence they can
harm this child.

This claim has been said to be incompatible with a person-affecting
view (see Heyd 1992, 102, 105-06, 241-42). In Section 3, two notions of harm will be distinguished. The first relies on
comparing a person's actual state to a counterfactual (or historical)
state of the same person. The second relies on no such
comparison. Both notions of harm require us to ask: for whom is
the action worse? However, while both notions can be
understood to reflect the person-affecting view as specified above
(Section 1), only the first fulfills the stronger conditions of
Parfit's “two-state requirement” or
“better-or-worse-for-the-same-person” requirement:
“we benefit or harm someone only if we cause him to be better or
worse off than he would otherwise at that time have been”
(Parfit 1984, 487). As will be shown in Section 3.2 below, in
applying the second notion, we do not have to compare the value
of life below some threshold with nonexistence in order to be able to
claim that we can cause harm to a person by bringing about that
person's existence.

Let us note that one can also defend the asymmetry of our
procreational duties from an impersonal view, according to which the
value of states of affairs is not reducible to how these states affect
the interests of people. From an impersonal view one does not have to
claim that prospective parents should refrain from procreation out
of regard for the children they would have. Based on this view,
two alternative interpretations of the asymmetry of our procreational
duties have been discussed in the literature. One could adopt a
version of negative consequentialism and argue that the universe would
be better if present generations were guided by a criterion of right
action that requires them to give priority to the prevention of
suffering over the creation of good and happiness (see Heyd 1992,
59-60, for problems with this account). Alternatively, an impersonal
approach could argue that we have a prima facie duty to
promote over-all happiness by creating new well-off people —
which duty, however, may be more easily overridden than duties not to
cause harm. The paradoxical implications of the latter view have been
prominently explored by Derek
Parfit.[8]

The main source of skepticism concerning the very possibility of
future people having welfare rights vis-à-vis those currently
living rests upon the contingency of future people upon currently
living people's decisions and actions. We know, of course, that when
we harm future people's interests and violate their rights, specific
persons are harmed. But the decision we take counts as a necessary
condition of the very existence of this genetically and numerically
specific set of people at some future point in time. The so-called
‘Non-Identity-Problem’ presupposes this fact and
interprets it as a challenge to the very possibility of
intergenerational justice.

Consider a policy of making intensive and extensive use of
exhaustible resources for the aim of increasing the welfare of
currently living people. If the policy is criticized for harming
future people on the ground that this policy will predictably worsen
their conditions of life and thus is likely to violate their welfare
rights, a defender of the policy could reply by saying: many, if not
all[9]
of our actions have (indirect) effects not only on the conditions of
life, but also on the composition of future persons, that is, on the
number, existence, and identity of future persons. This is also true
for actions that allegedly harm future persons. If the non-performance of the allegedly harmful action would have resulted in the allegedly harmed person not coming into existence, then that person cannot be said to have been harmed by
this action — or, at any rate, according to the common
understanding of harm (see Meyer 2003, 147-49, 155-58, for a detailed
discussion).

The common understanding is informed by a diachronic notion of
harm and a notion that requires a subjunctive comparison with
a historical baseline (hereinafter subjunctive-historical
notion of
harm).[10]
Both the diachronic and the subjunctive-historical notions of
harm require that the existence of the harmed person or people qua
individuals is independent of the harming act or policy. On the
diachronic notion of harm the following
formula holds:

(I) (diachronic) An action (or
inaction)[11]
at time t1 harms someone only if the agent causes
(allows) this person to be worse off at some later time
t2[12]
than the person was before t1.

On the subjunctive-historical notion of harm, the corresponding necessary condition for harming is:

(II) (subjunctive-historical) An action (or inaction) at
time t1 harms someone only if the agent causes
(or allows) this person to be worse off at some later time
t2 than the person would have been at
t2 had the agent not interacted with (or acted
with respect to) this person at
all.[13]

When considering future individuals as possible individuals both the
diachronic and the subjunctive-historical notions of harm will
exclude the possibility of present people harming future people, for the
(future) people whose interests and rights they are required to
respect are not in a particular state of well-being at the time they
take their decision — they do not, at that time, exist. But according
to (I) unless we can claim that the person is in a particular state of
well-being at the time of our decision, that is, at
t1, we cannot say that the person is worse off at
t2 owing to our decision at
t1. And likewise with (II): unless we can claim
that there is a specific person who would have been better off at
t2 than this person actually is at
t2 had we not acted with respect to this person at
all, this notion of harm makes no sense.

Adopting either the diachronic or the subjunctive-historical
notions of harm excludes the possibility of our harming future
people when we choose among long-term policies with significantly
differing consequences for the quality of life of future people. With
respect to persons whose existence is dependent upon the allegedly
harming action, they cannot be worse off owing to this action than
they would have been had this action not been carried out. For in that
case, they would not have existed.

We can distinguish four main responses to the
‘Non-Identity-Problem’ so understood: First, some
philosophers hold the view that future people whose existence depends
upon currently living people's actions cannot have rights
vis-à-vis the latter people's actions (see Schwartz 1978;
cf. Kavka 1982; Parfit 1984, part iv). Second, others argue that
currently living people can violate the rights of future people even
if the former cannot harm the latter (see Kumar 2003). If so, future people
cannot have welfare rights is-à-vis currently living people insofar as violating welfare rights implies setting back or harming the
interests of the right holders. Third, we can attempt to limit the
practical significance of the non-identity-problem by limiting the
relevant actions to those that are not only likely but indeed
necessary conditions of the existence of the concerned
person.[14]

Finally, some have sought to circumvent the non-identity problem by
suggesting an alternative notion of harm that is unaffected by
the non-identity-problem, the so-called ‘Threshold Conception of
Harm’. This notion substitutes the necessary condition:

(III) (threshold) An action (or inaction) at
time t1 harms a person only if the agent thereby causes (allows) either the coming into existence of this person in a sub-threshold state or the already existing person to be in a sub-threshold state; further, only if this person would not be in the harmed state had the agent not interacted with (or acted with respect to) this person at all; and furthermore, only if the agent, if he cannot avoid causing harm in this sense, does not minimize the harm.

According to such a threshold notion of harm an action harms a
person only if as a consequence of that action the (then existing) person falls below a
normatively defined threshold (see Shiffrin 1999; McMahan 1998,
223-29). This threshold notion is unaffected by the non-identity-problem, for here the finding of
harm does not require that the person who is in the sub-threshold state would be in a better state in the situation
that would have obtained in the absence of the harming action. Thus,
future people can be said to be harmed by currently living people's
actions even if these actions are among the necessary conditions of
the existence, identity or number of future people. Such a notion of
harm limits the practical significance of the non-identity-problem to
different degrees depending upon how the threshold is substantially
defined (see Section 4 below).

Both of the claims discussed above (in Sections 1 and 2, passim),
namely,

first, that considerations reflecting the welfare rights of future
people vis-à-vis present people can guide the latter in
choosing among long-term policies, and

second, that considerations of the rights of people not to be brought
into existence if they are likely not to realise a certain level of
well-being can guide prospective parents in deciding not to conceive out of regard for the
children they would otherwise have,

can be read as relying upon a threshold notion of harm.

Adopting either the diachronic or the subjunctive-historical
notions of harm or both excludes the possibility of our harming future
people when we choose among long-term policies with significantly
differing consequences for the quality of life of future people. But
if we adopt the threshold notion of harm at (III), future
people can be said to be wronged by our choice of a policy that harms
them, notwithstanding the fact that the existence of the specific
people who are said to be harmed is causally dependent on our decision
to pursue this
policy.[15]

The threshold notion of harm is also crucial for understanding
the second claim at issue. The three notions of harm as distinguished
above (Section 3.1) can be shown to have differing presuppositions when
they are used to explicate the claim that by bringing about the
existence of a child we can cause harm to this child. Consider the
following claims:

(a) A living person can be worse off than that person was
before she was conceived.

(b) Any life lived by a human being is commensurable with
non-existence.

(c) We can say of a person that she did not exist before her
conception.

(d) We can lay out a general standard of well-being so that we
violate a duty to a person when we cause this person to fall below the
standard specified, or when we fail to cause this person to reach the
standard.

In shorthand form, the situation is this: Depending on which notion
of harm is used, the claim that parents have harmed their child by
bringing it into existence presupposes a different set of assumptions
((a)-(d)): as explained below, notion (I) commits us to (a), (b), (c);
notion (II) commits us to (b) and (c); and notion (III) commits us to
(c) and (d). Propositions (a) and (b) will be shown to be, at very
least, implausible. Given that it is only the third notion of harm that,
when applied to procreative decisions, does not presuppose either (a)
or (b), this notion seems more apt for explicating the claim that we
can cause harm to a child by bringing about the existence of this
child.

All three notions presuppose assumption (c). Claiming that a person
harms another person by bringing about this person's existence
presupposes that bringing about someone's existence is something that
happens to this person at the time the person comes into existence.

When used to explicate the claim that we can cause harm to a
person by bringing that person into existence, (I) presupposes
assumption (a). But attributing a state of well-being to an egg cell
before its fertilization by a sperm does not seem to make sense. In
this case, however, (I) is inapplicable in the context in
question.

(II) presupposes (b). In claiming that, by bringing about a person's
existence, we thereby cause that person to be worse off than he or she
would otherwise have been at that time — if , that is, the
person had never come into existence — we are relying on the
possibility of making an intrapersonal comparison between the values
of nonexistence (in the sense of “never
existing”[16])
and a person's life. However, as David Heyd has pointed out:
“the comparison between life and nonexistence is blocked by two
considerations: the valuelessness of nonexistence as such and the
unattributability of its alleged value to individual subjects. The two
considerations are intimately connected: one of the reasons for
denying value to nonexistence of people is the very fact that
it cannot be attached to people.” (Heyd 1992, 37,
113). While a person can retrospectively prefer not to have been
brought into existence, it does not follow that this person would have
been better off had she never been brought into existence (but see
Roberts 1998, 151, assigning zero-value to never having existed). To
be sure, as we noted above, we can attribute to an existing person the
state “nonexistence before conception” just as we can
attribute the state of “having ceased to exist” to this
person. This does not mean, however, that never existing at all is of
(dis)value for that person.

In this respect, death seems to be different from never existing at
all. Life can be understood as an ongoing project that consists of
more particular projects that are defined in part by goals and whose
completion requires time (see Nagel 1979, 8-9). If a person's life is
cut short, this can be contrary to this person's interests. Through
death, the person is hindered from bringing his or her projects to
fruition. As far as carrying out these projects is concerned, there
may not be anyone else in a position to take this person's
place. Saying this does not require us to compare the value of the
state of being dead to the value of continuing to exist for the
person. Rather the “question is whether had one not died, had
one lived longer, one's survival would have been good for one”
(Raz 2001, 85). On the other hand, the fact that my pursuing certain
projects makes my life worth living for me does not mean that it would
necessarily have been undesirable for me not to have ever been given
the chance to form the idea of any meaningful projects, namely, by
having never been brought into existence at all. “Never
existing” is of (dis)value for no
one.[17]

Harm (III) relies on the idea that we have a general duty to people
not to cause them to be worse off than they should be. We can cause
— by our actions and omissions — a person to be worse off
than that person is entitled to be. This notion of harm
relies on, inter alia, our being able to specify a standard
of what any person is entitled to (d). In claiming that people should
refrain from having children out of regard for the children, when the
children can be expected to have a life that falls below the relevant
threshold, we rely on our being able to define what it means to be in a state
below the relevant threshold and to judge when lives are in that state. If we
make these assumptions, we can then use this notion of harm to
explicate the claim “by bringing a person into existence we can
cause harm to this person” without having to confront the
peculiar ethical difficulties discussed in the previous paragraphs. In
applying this notion of harm, we compare the values of “having a
sufficiently good life” and “having a life that falls
below the relevant threshold”. Comparing these values does not
present special difficulties either intrapersonally or
interpersonally.

Harming a person by bringing about his existence is clearly a
special case. When applied to this case, same-person-comparative
notions of harm (of which I and II are species) presuppose one or
both of (a) and (b), which were found to be
mistaken.[18]
Now, at
the time prospective parents consider whether they should revise their
decision to bring about the existence of a child, there is no right
bearer of the right to non-existence. But according to (III) this does
not mean that the parents could not act in light of an interest on the
part of their would-be child in never existing at all: if the child
were to be born, it would have a life below the relevant
threshold; thus, the parents ought not to conceive the child.

In the circumstances in which bringing about the existence of a
person causes harm to this person in the sense specified, the right to
non-existence is violated when, quite simply, the existence of the
person is brought about. The only way, here, in which the prospective
parents can avoid violation of the right is by ensuring that the person
whose right it would be does not come into existence at all. Thus, the
only way in which the prospective parents can respect the right is by
excluding the possibility that the right ever becomes actual.

Of course, we do not have to think of the right to non-existence as an absolute constraint on either people's procreational choices or policy choices that affect the composition of a future population. Rather, the right to non-existence is to be taken into account in the comparative consequential evaluation of such options (cf. Sen 1982). So if we have to choose between two policies both of which will lead to future sub-threshold lives we have a reason based on the right to non-existence for choosing the one that will lead to less people living below the threshold. However, the right to non-existence is not likely to be the only right to be taken into account when we choose between population policies. Thus, that a policy will lead to future sub-threshold lives is not by itself likely to make the policy morally prohibited.

Harm (III) does not support the claim that if a possible person were
to have a sufficiently good life, but a different person could instead
be brought into existence who would have an even better life, there is
an obligation to bring into existence the second, rather than the
first, child; nor does (III) support the analogous claim on the level
of collective decision-making: present generations have no obligation
to bring into existence only those whose lives, among possible future
persons, would be optimal.

To illustrate this, consider the following
example:[19]
A woman knows that if she conceives a baby now, because of a
particular disease she has the child will have a particular slight
handicap, but will enjoy a life above the relevant threshold of
well-being, however specified. Fortunately, there is a treatment
against this disease that is such that, afterwards, the woman will be
able to conceive a perfectly healthy child. The treatment takes three
months. There is, thus, no way this particular child can be
born without having this handicap. Can the woman be said to owe it to
her child to postpone conceiving a child until after she has been
treated for the disease? According to the view outlined here, she
cannot be said to owe this to her child so that she will not harm the
child (Woodward 1986, 815, fn. 12; Woodward 1987, 808-09). She might
have good reasons to receive the medical treatment and conceive later,
however. These reasons will reflect the interests of her and her
partner, as well as the interests of other present and future people
(cf. Section 2.2) Such interests could be important enough to give
rise to an obligation on the part of the parents. Then we can have
obligations not to bring into existence persons whose lives, although
still above the decency threshold, are less worth living than the
lives of others we could bring into existence in different
circumstances, but these obligations are not grounded on
considerations of harm to the future children in question —
assuming here and in the following discussion that we can meaningfully
carry out the relevant calculations and weighings.

To support the claim that parents do owe it to their
prospective child to bring into existence the possible child who,
among the options available to them, enjoys the highest level of
well-being, we will have to rely on a different notion of harm —
namely a notion of harm which is based upon the comparison of the
state of a person to the counterfactual state of another person who
could have been brought into existence instead of him:

(subjunctive-different-person) Having brought about a
person's existence at a time t1, the agent thereby
harms someone only if the agent causes this person to be worse off at
some later time t2 (see note 12) than another
person — whose existence the agent could have brought about
instead — would have been at t2 had the
agent acted
differently.[20]

Prospective parents might bring about more or less people (one child,
twins, triplets etc.) depending upon their decisions. Decisions
concerning long-term policies are likely to have an impact on the size
of the future population (see Section 2). Thus at least when we wish to
support an analogous claim at the collective level, we will
have to allow for different numbers also:

(subjunctive-different-persons) Having brought about a
person's existence at a time t1, the agent thereby
harms someone only if the agent causes this person to be worse off at
some later time t2 (see note 12) than other
persons — whose existence the agent could have brought about
instead — would have been at t2 (on average or individually in absolute terms) had the
agent acted differently.

If we follow the subjunctive-different-person(s) notion of
harm, a person whose quality of life is above the relevant threshold
of well-being will be considered harmed if there is a possible state
of affairs in which this person would not have existed but another
person or other persons would have existed and the latter person or
persons would have realized an even higher quality of life (on average or individually in absolute terms). But
according to the person-affecting approach and from the perspective of
the allegedly harmed person the comparison of the life of this person
and the counterfactual state of affairs in which this person could
never have existed but another person or other persons would exist
does not make sense. We cannot attribute the alleged value of
non-existence to individual
subjects.[21]

In summary: It is at the very least difficult (if not impossible) to
understand why a person should be considered harmed if the person can
be considered harmed according to neither the subjunctive-historical
(II) nor the diachronic (I) nor the threshold (III)
notions of
harm.[22]
This is not to say that we cannot have person-affecting reasons to
prefer a future of people who have lives far above the relevant
threshold of well-being to a future of people whose lives are less
good but sufficiently good, points to which we shall return (see Section
4.5 below). We next turn to the question how we should understand the notions of harm (I-III) as distinguished in light of the so-called ‘No-Difference
View’.

Derek Parfit has introduced the ‘No-Difference
View’: It makes no (practical or theoretical) difference to how
we should act, all things considered, whether the size and composition
of future generations depend upon our present decision. To what extent
we can defend that view will depend on how we understand the relation
between the notions of harm as distinguished in Section 3.1: Here we will delineate two views of how to understand these notions of harm and investigate the question of the extent to which these two alternative views support Parfit's ‘No-Difference
View’. According to our first view, one must choose between the “single
threshold” and the “single
subjunctive-historical” notion of harm: to claim that
rights-considerations can guide us in choosing among long-term policies
we will have to adopt one of these notions of harm as
specifying necessary conditions of harm; in doing so, we have to deny
that the other notion specifies necessary (or sufficient)
conditions of harm. According to the second view, the
threshold notion of harm and the
subjunctive-historical notion can be combined.

According to this “disjunctive notion” the necessary condition
for harming is the disjunction of the conditions for harming as set
out by the notions of harm at (II) and (III). The proposal is this:
instead of interpreting accounts of harm at (II) and (III) as
providing alternative necessary conditions for harming, we can
take these two notions to provide the disjuncts for a necessary condition for harming. This disjunctive notion of harm substitutes yet a fourth necessary condition of what it means to harm someone:

(IV) (disjunctive) An action (or inaction) at time t1
harms someone only if either (as in III) the agent thereby causes (allows) this person to be in a sub-threshold state, and, if the agent cannot avoid causing harm in this sense, does not minimize the harm;[23]
or (as in II) the agent causes this person to be worse off at some later
time t2 than the person would have been at
t2 had the agent not interacted with this person
at all.

We ought clearly to prefer the disjunctive notion to the single subjunctive-historical view according to which the
subjunctive-historical notion of harm specifies necessary conditions
of harm (and the threshold notion at (III) specifies
neither necessary nor sufficient conditions). The disjunctive notion is
compatible with the thesis of this entry that relies upon our
employing a threshold notion of harm where the
subjunctive-historical and the diachronic notions do not
apply.[24]
Ought we to prefer the disjunctive notion to the single
threshold notion according to which the threshold condition is a necessary condition of harm? The advantage of the disjunctive notion is that this view of harm allows us to rely on the subjunctive-historical notion of harm whenever it is
applicable, that is, when we will harm an existing person. In these
cases the notion of harm at (II) provides us with a straightforward
account of the harm caused.

Consider the type of case where we can act in a way that diminishes
the well-being of a person who lives above any plausibly construed
threshold. However, we will diminish the person's well-being to a
level still clearly above the threshold. For example, someone breaks
into the garage of a mansion and steals the new convertible while the
wealthy owner is at his penthouse in the city. This theft is not
likely to cause the wealthy person's well-being to fall below any
plausibly construed threshold of harm, and thus according to (III) does
not harm him. This seems implausible. Such a case is normally
understood as a case in which the affected person is clearly
harmed. More generally, the objection is that the threshold conception
is under-inclusive in interpreting which acts we consider harmful.

The single threshold view by itself does not provide us
with a response to this objection. For a plausible substantive
specification of a threshold notion (see Section 4.3 below) will
not include a concern for the well-being of those above the
threshold. Thus, in responding to the objection we would have to add
an additional obligation. E.g., we could appeal to the additional
obligation of minimizing harm to other persons: The obligation
requires that we not cause another person to fall to a lower level of
well-being quite independently of the level of well-being the person
already realizes. What counts as a lower level of well-being can be
measured by the specified threshold.

On the other hand, the disjunctive notion allows us to rely on the notion
of harm at (II). This provides us with a straightforward
account of the harm caused. Thus, the disjunctive notion is not open
to the objection as stated. However, while the single
threshold view can be shown to be fully
compatible with Parfit's No-Difference View, the disjunctive notion of harm
raises difficult questions of interpretation of its own.

Parfit illustrates the No-Difference View by considering two medical
programs (Parfit 1984, 367). In each case a certain rare condition
can be passed from mother to child. One involves pregnancy testing. If
the test comes out positive, fetuses are treated for the rare
condition. The other involves preconception testing. The women who
test positive as carriers of the rare condition are told to postpone
conception for at least two months and to undergo (harmless) treatment
after which the condition will have disappeared. Available funds can
be spent on one or the other program, and the other must be
cancelled. Assuming that both programs have equivalent effects on
parents, that the conditions lead to the same particular handicap in
children, and that the two programs will achieve a similar success
rate, the programs differ only in affecting actual people (pregnancy
testing) or possible people (preconception testing). The (practical)
no-difference view says: our reason to prevent harm to possible future
people (those who might be conceived) is as strong as our reason to
prevent harm to actual people (those already conceived who will
develop from the already existing fetuses in due course). The two
medical programs in Parfit's example are equally worthy and it makes
no moral difference which is cancelled.

Is the disjunctive notion of harm compatible with the no-difference view,
thus understood? Here we cannot discuss the implications of the
disjunctive notion in any detail. We might first observe that both the
subjunctive-historical and threshold notions of harm can
be employed to interpret many core cases of harm. That is to say, both
sets of conditions as specified by the two notions of harm will
arguably be satisfied in many cases where most people agree that harm
was caused — at least under plausible construals of both
notions of harm. Second, in the cases in which not all sets of
conditions obtain, we still find that harm was caused, namely, as long
as at least one set of conditions obtains. If the
threshold notion of harm applies, we find that harm was
caused. The disjunctive notion entails that canceling either test causes
harm.

However, the disjunctive notion does not entail that it makes no practical
difference which test we cancel. A plausible interpretation of the
disjunctive notion might be the following: satisfying either set of the
conditions provides a reason for objecting to the proposed action; if
both sets of conditions obtain, the objection is presumably stronger
than when only one set of conditions
obtains.[25]
According to this understanding of the disjunctive notion and assuming
that in Parfit's example of the two medical programs the children, if
either they or their mothers are not treated, will suffer a severe
handicap, the objection to canceling pregnancy testing is stronger
than the objection to canceling the preconception testing
program. Because the handicap is severe, the children will fall below
the threshold and the threshold notion of harm provides
the same reason for objecting to canceling either program. But if
pregnancy testing is cancelled this will be worse for the children who
are not treated — the subjunctive-historical notion of harm
applies. The subjunctive-historical notion of harm does not, however, provide
a reason for objecting to cancellation of preconception testing. The
children who will be born handicapped would never have existed if
there had been testing prior to
conception.[26]
This understanding of the disjunctive notion may not, then, be compatible with the no-difference view. An
alternative understanding would deny that where both notions of harm are
applicable this strengthens the objection to the harmful act.

The single threshold interpretation of harm is also compatible
with a second and stronger understanding of the no-difference view: there is
no theoretical difference in harming possible future people
and harming actual people since the very same reasons hold against
harming either
group.[27]
The disjunctive notion is clearly incompatible
with the theoretical understanding of the no-difference view.
According to the disjunctive notion it would often not be true that the same
reasons hold against harming either such group. When we object to the
harming of actual people we will often have additional reasons that
reflect the fact that the subjunctive-historical notion of harm
applies.[28]

The above mentioned considerations seem to suggest a specification of
the relevant threshold as a sufficientarian standard defined
in terms of absolute, noncomparative conditions (Shiffrin 1999,
123-24; McMahan 1998, 223-29). One could hold a
unitary view of the threshold according to which one and the same
threshold would be applicable to all
decisions.[29]
Even if we held that the same list of rights were attributable to all
people (wherever and whenever they live), for example, those which are
meant to protect basic capabilities of human beings, what these rights
amount to will reflect contemporary social, economic, and cultural
conditions (see, e.g., Sen 1984; Nussbaum 2000, 132-33).

Specifying the standard by attributing equal minimal rights to people
is only one possible interpretation of the threshold. We might,
instead, want to define the threshold on the basis of egalitarian
reasons. On the basis of these reasons we will object to inequalities,
for egalitarian reasons make it possible for us to understand relative
differences between the states of persons as something “which is
itself to be eliminated or reduced” (Scanlon 2005, 6). Egalitarian
considerations that address relative differences between people can
help specify the standard in at least two ways. We might hold that
the standing of people relative to their contemporaries is
(extrinsically or
intrinsically)[30]
important and that the threshold notion of harm ought to reflect,
say, the average level of well-being that people realize — or
that future people will realize: the higher the average level of
well-being the higher the threshold level of harm should be
set. According to one interpretation of such an egalitarian reading,
presently existing people harm future people by causing them to
realize a (much) lower level of well-being than their own
contemporaries (Sher 1979, 389). In addition or alternatively, we
might hold that the threshold level ought to reflect, say, the average
level of well-being of the present generations upon whose decisions
the existence, identity, and well-being of future people
depend. According to such an interpretation presently existing people
harm future people by causing them to realize a (much) lower level of
well-being than they enjoy themselves (see, for example, Barry 1999).
Still, even if egalitarian considerations that reflect a concern with
the relative differences between people can contribute to the
specification of the threshold, a plausible threshold is not going to
be based on that concern, but will reflect primarily a concern with
the absolute level of well-being of persons. Otherwise — this is
an implication of the first interpretation — any level of
well-being would be considered justified as long as all future people
fare equally badly. This presupposes attributing intrinsic value
exclusively to equality — an implausible
view.[31]
Moreover, to define the threshold standard of well-being of future
people as the level of well-being achieved by currently living people
(whatever it may be) is less than plausible, unless we were to
attribute intrinsic value exclusively to intergenerational equality,
so understood (see Marmor 2003, Steiner 2003, Raz 2003, Gosepath 2004,
454-63; and Holtug and Lippert-Rasmussen 2007). This view would deny
that currently living people may stand under a duty of justice
positively to save for future people so that they will achieve a
sufficientarian level of
well-being.[32]

According to the priority view (Parfit 1997, 213), equality
as such does not matter. It is therefore not open to objections
against holding equality to be of intrinsic value. A plausible
version of the priority view reads as follows:

Priority view: Benefitting persons matters more the worse off
the person is to whom the benefits accrue, the more people are being
benefited and the greater the benefits in question.

The priority view has a built-in tendency towards equality, for the
view accepts the following egalitarian condition: If X is
worse off than Y, we have at least a prima facie
reason for promoting the well-being of X rather than
Y (unless conditions obtain under which the only or best way
of raising the well-being of X is by raising the well-being
of Y or conditions under which promoting the well-being of
X brings about raising the well-being of Y as a
side-effect). Even if prioritarians do not see anything intrinsically
bad in social, economic or other differences, their priority view is a
derivatively egalitarian view. To this extent it is correctly
described as non-relational egalitarianism.

We might want to rely on, say, a prioritarian version of
utilitarianism for specifying the threshold of harm. On this
interpretation, future people are in a harmed state unless they are as
well off as such a prioritarian view requires. However, such a
prioritarian view for specifying the threshold of harm has most
implausible implications even if it is coupled with the
person-affecting approach. First, such a view is likely to define just
one optimal outcome for people's actions; people's failing to bring
about this outcome would then have to count as harming others. Thus
most people's actions will count as harming others. Second, it implies
a version of Derek Parfit's so-called ‘repugnant conclusion (see
Parfit 1984), part iv, and ch. 17; see also Ryberg and
Tännsjö 2004 and the entry on the
repugnant conclusion).
Given, first, the large number of future people whose level of
well-being can be affected by the decisions and actions of currently
living people, and second, that the number of future people depends in
part upon currently living people's decisions and actions, the
priority view might make unreasonable demands on the currently
living. How likely this is will also depend upon the strength we give
to the priority of the worse off who are (very) badly off. According
to such a prioritarian view, in assessing alternative options we will
have to weigh the claims to improvements as well as to take into
account both the size of the benefit and the number of beneficiaries;
if the number of future people is sufficiently large, we would then
have to choose the option that improves their well-being even if both
their claims to improvements in well-being are weak and the benefits
they receive are small. If the number of future people is sufficiently
large, currently living people could well stand under an obligation to
improve their well-being even if in fulfilling this obligation they
lose a great deal of their own well-being and the improvements in
well-being of future people are small or even trivial.

It thus seems plausible to reject the idea that the priority view as such specifies the relevant threshold of intergenerational harm. Instead, the priority view can be understood to specify rather what we optimally ought to do as a matter of morality. However, (future) people might be thought not to be harmed if currently living people do less than that. It might be permissible to bring about a less than optimal outcome. The less than optimal outcome could not be said to be harmful to future people. However, such a view depends upon our being able to specify the relevant threshold of intergenerational harm in a different way. For this purpose, we now turn to sufficientarian interpretations of the threshold.

A sufficientarian conception of justice also holds that equality as
such does not matter. And sufficientarianism also has a built-in
tendency to equality. However, the tendency is restricted in the
following way: To benefit person X is more important than to
benefit person Y, if X is below the threshold and if
Y is better off than X. On a low level of
well-being, equality is of derivative value. In other words,
concerning the improvement of the position of the less well off,
sufficientarianism holds both a negative and a positive thesis: Below
the threshold the priority view is valid (this being the positive
thesis), above the threshold the improvement of the position of the
less well off is of no particular concern (this being the negative
thesis).[33]

We can distinguish between weak and strong interpretations of
sufficientarianism.[34]
According to weak sufficientarianism the priority to be given to
people below the threshold decreases to zero at the
threshold. However, as the priority view, the position of weak
sufficientarianism can also make unreasonable demands on the currently
living. For, even if we attribute particular weight to improving the
well-being of people below the threshold, we might be able to do more
good (in total) by benefiting many more people who are well-off
already — that is, if, as seems plausible, we give some weight to the well-being of people above the threshold.[35]

The position of strong sufficientarianism, however, differs from weak
sufficientarianism in how it interprets the priority of persons below
the threshold. Strong sufficientarianism attributes a significant
priority to those whose well-being is just below the threshold (while
according to weak sufficientarianism this priority decreases to zero
at the threshold). Versions of sufficientarianism are stronger the
greater the priority they attribute to those just below the
threshold. With an absolute or lexical priority threshold strong
sufficientarianism also rejects the view that it always matters
more — either below or above the threshold — to benefit
persons the more people are being benefited and the greater the
benefits in question. This precludes the implication of unreasonable
demands on currently living people as discussed. Accordingly a
plausible version of strong sufficientarianism can be
characterized as follows:

Strong sufficientarianism: First, to the group of persons
whose improvement in well-being has absolute or lexical priority
belong those whose level of well-being is below the threshold; to
benefit persons below the threshold matters more the worse off they
are. Second, and in addition, while within the group of both those below and those above the threshold, it matters more to
benefit persons the more people are being benefited and the greater
the benefit in question, trade-offs between persons above and below
the threshold are precluded.

Richard Arneson and others (Arneson 1999, 2000; Roemer 2004, 16-17,
28) have objected to thresholds, and especially those that designate
an absolute priority — as is characteristic of the position of
strong sufficientarianism — on the grounds that we cannot avoid
an arbitrary specification of such priority thresholds and, further,
that such thresholds are incompatible with our distributive
convictions' being continuous (that is, that they all can be accounted
for by means of one principle of distribution). For the purposes of
the present discussion we will assume that one could justify a
priority threshold as specified by strong
sufficientarianism.[36]
If so, the objections to specifying the threshold in terms of the
prioritarian conception and the conception relying on the notion that
equality is of intrinsic value present a particular reason for holding
that the specification of the threshold ought to be informed by a
sufficientarian understanding of justice, at least for
intergenerational relations.

In defining the relevant threshold of harm we may also rely on considerations
that reflect the significance of relative differences among future
people or people who belong to different generations including the
currently living. Considerations characteristic of the priority view
may also be considered relevant for the specification of the
threshold of harm. It is implausible, however, to hold the view that we might
define the relevant standard as reflecting reasons solely based on
egalitarian or prioritarian weighting of claims to improvements of
well-being. Defining a threshold of well-being according to which
both currently and future living people are able to reach a
sufficientarian threshold allows us to avoid the implausible
implications of the egalitarian and prioritarian alternatives when we understand the latter to define thresholds of harm: First,
avoiding or reducing differences must not lead to a state of affairs
in which people are worse off than they ought to be. Secondly, claims
against currently living people are unreasonable if in fulfilling them
the currently living people will bring about minimal or even trivial
improvements of the well-being of future people but suffer losses
themselves, causing them to fall below a plausible threshold level of
well-being.

This is not to say that it is impermissible for people to choose to procreate when securing a threshold level of well-being for their children-to-be will require them to sacrifice their own well-being to such a degree that they themselves will not enjoy a threshold level of well-being. Rather, in decision-making contexts where currently living people relate to future people who will exist (and in high numbers) whatever they will decide to do, currently living people do not harm future people when they secure a threshold level of well-being for them even if they could further improve the well-being of future people. And: in such decision-making contexts currently living people cannot be said to stand under an obligation to sacrifice their own well-being so that they will fall below the threshold standard of well-being for the sake of securing a well-being for future people over and above the standard.

If these objections against an egalitarian and prioritarian specification of the threshold of harm are valid, we have particular reasons for
interpreting intergenerational justice according to a sufficientarian
threshold. At the same time, the reasons for a sufficientarian
understanding of intergenerational justice are not equally relevant
for the relations among contemporaries — never mind whether we
think of these contemporaries simply as people wherever they may live,
or as members of a well-ordered liberal society, or as found in
different basic political units. For the reasons reflect particular
features of intergenerational relations: The non-identity-problem
simply does not arise in relations among contemporaries. The problem
does not arise among institutionalized transgenerational legal
entities such as Rawls's peoples or states understood as subjects of
public international law, either. Also, the objections to both the
prioritarian conception and the conception relying on the notion that
equality is of intrinsic value reflect, in part, particular features
of intergenerational relations: The repugnant conclusion as an
implication of the priority view presupposes that both the number and
the identity of future people are contingent upon the decisions of
currently living people; a large number of future people leads to
unreasonable demands on currently living people — this as an
implication of the priority view, too. Moreover, we can demand of
currently living people that they positively save for future people
only in the context of intergenerational relations. Thus, the specific
reasons for a sufficientarian understanding of intergenerational
justice are at least in part specific reasons and are not relevant for
understanding either global justice or the notion of justice that
holds among contemporary members of well-ordered
societies.[37]

We owe to John Rawls the first systematic discussion of obligations to
future people (Rawls 1971 and 1999, especially sections 44; Rawls
1993, 274; Rawls 2001, especially sections 49.2 and 3). Rawls
proposes a principle of “just savings”. Rawls never
discusses the non-identity-problem and for most of his discussions he
assumes that the number of future people is
constant.[38]
However, his principle of just savings can be understood to provide
us with a particularly sensible (and, certainly, the most prominent)
substantive understanding of intergenerational sufficientarianism. It
can be understood as an interpretation of a threshold
notion of harm in different number
choices.

Rawls specifies the sufficientarian threshold relevant for defining
currently living people's obligations of justice vis-à-vis
future people: “the conditions needed to establish and to preserve a
just basic structure over time” (Rawls 2001, 159). Rawls distinguishes
two stages of societal development for the application of his
principle of just savings. Currently living people have a
justice-based reason to save for future people only if such saving is
necessary for allowing future people to reach the sufficientarian
threshold as specified. This is known as the accumulation stage. Once
just institutions are securely established — this is known as
the steady-state stage — justice does not require people to save
for future people. Rather they should do what is necessary to allow
future people to continue to live under just institutions. Rawls also
holds that, in that second stage, people ought to leave their
descendants at least the equivalent of what they received from the
previous generation (see Gosseries 2001 for a comparative assessment
of Rawls's substantive principle). This additional claim can be
supported by the idea of a presumption in favor of equality (see
Sidgwick 1907, 379-80, and the entry on
equality)
and by the considerations delineated in the next section
(Section 4.5).

As is characteristic of Rawls's work, he presents the just savings
principle as the outcome of a decision reached in the contractualist
(hypothetical and non-historical) decision-situation of the original
position. Who are the persons in the original position? Rawls
considers an original position in which every generation is
represented. However, as the relations between the contractors so
conceived are not characterized by the “circumstances of
justice” (Rawls 1971, paragraph 22), the question of justice as
Rawls understands it does not arise: We cannot cooperate with previous
generations and, while previous generations can benefit or harm us, we
cannot benefit or harm them (see Section
1).[39]
Instead Rawls therefore adjusts the (present-time of entry)
interpretation of the original position for the intergenerational
context (Rawls 1993), 274; Rawls 2001, paragraph 25.2). The
contractors know that they belong to one generation, but the veil of
ignorance blinds them to which particular generation they belong. From
this position they determine a just savings rate.

While the circumstances of justice clearly hold among contemporaries,
the contractors cannot know whether previous generations have saved
for them. Why then should they agree to save for future generations?
In A Theory of Justice, Rawls stipulates “a
motivational assumption” according to which the contractors care
for their descendants so that they will want to agree to save for
their successors — irrespective of whether previous generations
saved for them. In Political Liberalism, Rawls withdraws this
motivational assumption. He now understands previous generations'
non-compliance with a just savings principle as a problem of non-ideal
theory.[40]
The original position, however, belongs to ideal theory: strict
compliance with whatever principles are agreed on is assumed (Rawls
1971, 144-45). Rawls introduces problems of partial and
non-compliance only at the level of non-ideal theory (Rawls 1971,
ch. iv). In accordance with this understanding of ideal theory, Rawls
assumes that the generations are mutually disinterested. He takes the
contractors to agree to a savings principle “subject to the
further condition that they must want all previous
generations to have followed it.” Rawls continues: “Thus
the correct principle is that which the members of any generation (and
so all generations) would adopt as the one their generation is to
follow and as the principle they would want preceding generations to
have followed (and later generations to follow), no matter how far
back (or forward) in time” (Rawls 1993, 274; Rawls 2001, 160).
The principle of just savings thus agreed on is thought to be binding
for all previous and future
generations.[41]

So far this entry has argued for interpreting intergenerational
justice in terms of a conception for which a sufficientarian threshold
is of central significance. The argument is, in part, a response to
the non-identity-problem. A sufficientarian interpretation of the
threshold notion of harm (together with an appropriate
conception of wrongdoing) provides us with a plausible understanding
of what is owed to future people: the fact that future persons'
existence is contingent on our present decisions does not matter where
what is in question is our ability to harm future people's interests
and to violate their rights. By employing a non-comparative
notion of harm one can justify the present generation's duties
not to violate the rights of future generations against being
harmed. Accordingly, rights-based considerations may not bear merely
upon “same people choices”, but will bear also upon both
types of “different people choices” that Parfit
distinguishes, namely “same number choices” (in which the
same number of future people live, irrespective of present choices)
and “different number choices” (in which a different
number of future people will live depending on which choices we now
make) (Parfit 1984, 355-56). Thus, intergenerational
sufficientarianism allows us to specify the considerations of justice
relevant for decisions concerning population policies: Future people
have rights vis-à-vis us that reflect considerations of justice
as specified by intergenerational sufficientarianism. Our correlative
duties set a normative framework for most of our decisions concerning
future people, including those that have an impact on their number and
identity.

However, such a framework does not provide a complete moral theory of
intergenerational relations and especially not in the context of
decisions on the existence, number, and identity of future
people. There are concerns for future people shared by many of us that
cannot be accounted for by rights-based considerations (De-Shalit
1995, ch. 1). First, many of us believe that that it is
important that there be future people at all. However, a
person-affecting intergenerational sufficientarianism will account for
the asymmetry of our procreational duties (see Section 2.2): On the
one hand, prospective parents should refrain from procreation out of
regard for the child(ren) they would have if the life of their child(ren)
would fall below the relevant sufficientarian
threshold.[42]
On the other hand, people have no obligation to procreate out of
regard for the interests of possible future children. Possible people
have no right to be brought into existence (and we do not have the
correlative obligation to procreate). Second, many of us believe that
future people should have a life that is well above the level of
well-being specified by a threshold notion of
harm.[43]
This, in part, reflects a third concern many have: Future people
should be able to share (at least certain aspects of) the particular way of life of currently living people. But, presumably, currently living people do not violate the rights of future people by failing to sustain their way of life for them. Thus, we
cannot prefer a future with people all of whom have lives far above
the level of a sufficiency threshold to a future with no people on the
basis of considerations of rights of future
people.[44]

This insufficiency of rights considerations in guiding our choices
concerning future people is not restricted to our choices of
population policies. It will be apparent whenever we are choosing
between securing sufficiently good conditions of life for actual
future people and securing conditions under which actual future people
will be able to live lives above the level of the sufficientarian
threshold. For example, assuming that future people have certain
welfare rights against us, there are considerations based on the
rights of future people that prohibit us from choosing a policy of
depletion. However, such considerations might well be insufficient in
guiding us in choosing among alternative conservation policies that
have different consequences with respect to the quality of life future
people can be expected to enjoy.

Clearly, considerations based on the rights of future people cannot or
cannot fully account for all the concerns we might have for future
people. What considerations besides rights-based considerations can
guide us in our relations to future people? It has been suggested
that the widely shared concerns about the continuation of human life
on earth at a high level of well-being can, at least in part, be
accounted for by an obligation toward future people that have no
correlatives in future people's rights vis-à-vis current
people. This obligation reflects those widely shared concerns about
future people which cannot be accounted for by rights-based
considerations. The obligation can be described along the following
lines (Baier 1981; Meyer 2005, chs. 4 and 5):
those currently alive owe respect to highly valuable goods that their
predecessors bequeathed to them as well as to more remote future
people, and they also owe respect to the highly valuable
future-oriented projects of their contemporaries. Owing such respect
gives rise to a general obligation, namely that current people should
not willfully destroy the inherited goods and the conditions that are
constitutive of persons' pursuit of future-oriented projects. In other
words, such respect gives rise to a general obligation that one not
willfully destroy the social practices on which the possibility of
people pursuing future-oriented projects depends. While future people
belong to the beneficiaries, the obligation is owed to both present
and past people (see also Section 5).

Intergenerational justice concerns the relations between
generations. So far we have mainly addressed the relations between
currently living and future people. This section discusses the three
issues that have been central to the philosophical investigation of
the relations between past people and currently living people and to
understanding the significance of what happened in the past (and, in
particular, of past wrongs) for currently living (and future) people's
justice claims: First, how can currently living people be understood
to be negatively affected by historical injustices? Second, can the
ongoing effect of past wrongs become legitimate when circumstances
change? And, thirdly, we need to address the question of the moral
status of deceased persons and dead victims of injustice in
particular.

With respect to harm-doing suffered by victims in the past at the
hands of perpetrators in the past the non-identity-problem gives rise
to the following general question: how can individuals today have a
just claim to compensation owing to what was done to others in the
past when the (potential) claimants may not exist today had past
people not suffered these harms (Morris 1984; Kumar and Silver 2004)?
The non-identity problem arises with respect to several specific
understandings of how to justify claims to historic compensation. Here
we discuss currently living people's just claims to historic
compensation based on a causal link between the past injustices and
the harm suffered by them today. The causal link may be constituted in
at least two ways: the harm suffered by victims in the past at the
hands of perpetrators in the past causes additional harm for currently
living people; or the harming activities of the past perpetrators
harmed currently living people along with victims in the past. In
Sections 5.3-4 we investigate the question whether compensation can be
owed to past victims. Giving benefits to currently living descendants
may be thought to be appropriate compensation for the harms victims in
the past suffered at the hands of perpetrators in the past.

For example, do African Americans, whose ancestors were subjected to
the terrible injustices of being kidnapped in Africa and subsequently
enslaved, have a just claim to
compensation?[45]
Let us set aside a host of specifically legal questions concerning,
for example, the statute of limitations and liability. Let us also
assume that it is sometimes possible to identify with certainty direct
descendants of slaves. Consider the case of Robert, who has been
identified as one such person (see Fishkin 1991, 91-93). People can
claim compensation for harms they suffered. As a descendant of slaves,
has Robert been harmed owing to the injustices suffered by his
ancestors? First, consider briefly the subjunctive-historical notion
of harm at (II) (see Section 3.1). According to this interpretation
of harm, a person can be understood to be fully compensated for an act
or policy (or
event)[46]
when she is as well off as she would have been had the act not been
carried out. According to this interpretation of harm, it is not the
case that Robert has been harmed by his ancestors' having been
kidnapped and enslaved. If his ancestors had not been kidnapped and
enslaved, Robert would not exist today. His existence depends on the
fact that the genealogical chain was not broken at any point. Hence,
the initial kidnapping in Africa, the transport to America, and the
slavery of his ancestors are necessary conditions for Robert's having
come into existence at all. He would not have been better off had his
ancestors not been badly wronged. Thus, we cannot rely upon this
interpretation of harm and its accompanying interpretations of
compensation in claiming that Robert has been harmed and should be
compensated; the required state of affairs under this interpretation
implies the nonexistence of the claimant to
compensation.[47]

To this claim we can respond in a number of ways. As suggested by our
discussion in secs. 3 and 4 we can allow for an identity-independent
notion of harm in addition to the common identity-dependent notion of
harm. Consider the threshold notion of harm at (III). Under this
interpretation of harm, a person can be understood to be fully
compensated for an act or policy (or event) if that person does not
fall below the specified standard. According to this interpretation,
Robert can be harmed because his ancestors were kidnapped and
enslaved. Whether Robert has been harmed due to the way his ancestors
were treated depends upon whether the way they were treated has led to
Robert's falling below the specified standard of well-being. That this
is true in the case of Robert, however, will turn on a causal link
between the past injustices and his current state of
well-being. Employing this interpretation of harm and its accompanying
interpretation of compensation requires a forward-looking assessment
of what others ought to do today in terms of providing compensation
for past
injustice.[48]
When we analyze historical claims on the basis of such a threshold
notion of harm, the current normative relevance of past wrongs will
depend upon their causal relevance for the well-being of currently
living (and future) generations. Fulfilling our duties to both the
latter might well require compensation for the consequences that stem
from the fact that their predecessors have been badly wronged. That
their predecessors were wronged, however, does not in itself give rise
to just claims of compensation on the part of their descendants
today. Thus in accordance with the disjunctive notion of harm (IV) as
discussed above (Section 4), present generations can have obligations
to compensate those who currently suffer harms resulting from the
lasting impact of injustices experienced by their predecessors, even
if the reasons for providing them with compensation are different from
(and possibly less weighty than (see Section 4.2)) the reasons for
compensating people whose identities are not dependent on (or changed
by) the harmful acts.

However, the non-identity-problem is of little practical significance
for assessing the validity of rights to compensation or restitution
owing to more recent past injustices. First, the non-identity-problem
does not arise with respect to surviving victims of wrongs. The harm
done to surviving victims can be understood in accordance with the
common understanding of harm: the past wrongdoing caused these people
to be worse off than they would have been in the absence of that act
or policy. These individuals would be fully compensated for the harm
done to them where it the case that as a result of compensation
undertaken they are as well off as they would be if the policy had not
been carried out.

Second, consider the case of people having been wrongfully expelled
from their homeland and not having received compensation for the
wrongs inflicted upon them. For their descendants it might well be
true that they would not exist had their parents and (great-)
grandparents not been expelled. However, the descendants can be said
to be victims of the additional wrong that their parents did not
receive compensation for the wrongs inflicted upon them. The
individual descendants can be said to have been harmed from conception
or birth because of the lack of sufficient compensation to their
parents (Sher 2005). Again, the harm done to them can be understood in
accordance with the common understanding of harm: If those entities
which stand under the obligation to provide compensation to the first
generation of displaced persons do not (entirely) fulfill their
obligations, they thereby harm the descendants of the first generation
of displaced people by making those descendants worse off than they
would otherwise be — i.e., if (sufficient) compensation had been
provided by the first generation. This line of argument can be
extended to the second, third, fourth etc. generation: generation X of
displaced people would be fully compensated for the harm done to them
were it the case that as a result of compensation undertaken the
people of generation X are as well off as the people of this
generation would be if the first generation of displaced people had
received the compensation they were entitled to. While it is clear
that thus understood the later generations' claims to compensation do
not have to contend with the non-identity problem (Sher 2005), what is
owed to them will depend on how best to understand the counterfactual
relevant to determine the amount of compensation owed. Here we do not
discuss the intricate problem of how best to understand the relevant
counterfactual (cf. Sher 1979, 1981).

However, most agree that the legitimacy of people's claims to
compensation can depend upon their actions (and inactions) and the
impact these have on their well-being. For these actions (and
inactions) can normatively be attributed to people only insofar as
they make the decision to act (or not act). Then the strength of later
generations' claim to compensation — owing to the failure of
providing sufficient compensation to the first generation that
suffered the initial harm — may wane over time. The more the
descendants' well-being can be attributed to actions or inactions for
which they themselves or members of the intermediate generations are
responsible, the less the hypothetical state of affairs that would
obtain had the direct victims received adequate compensation is
relevant[49]
for the determination of the claims of the indirect victims (Sher
1981).

We will have to assess the practical significance of this insight for
each case. For the claims to compensation of the first couple of
generations of descendants for the direct victims the insight is
likely to be of little practical significance. The harm done to their
ancestors is not ancient. Thus, the descendants' claim to compensation
— based on the harm inflicted on them due to the failure of
providing adequate compensation for the initial harm — is likely
to be strong.

We now turn to a second source of doubts about the validity of
historical claims to reparations. Injustices committed against people
in the past may not give rise to claims to reparations today if such
claims can be understood to presuppose an indefensible interpretation
of property entitlements. David Lyons and Jeremy Waldron argue that
the view that once we acquire entitlements they continue until we
transfer or relinquish them is indefensible since there are reasons of
principle[50]
for holding that entitlements and rights are sensitive to the passage
of time and changes of circumstances. According to Waldron entitlement
to land is based upon the idea that such entitlement can be an
integral part of people's life plans and projects as individuals and
as members of groups. Entitlements to land can be important for people
being able to autonomously realize particular goods of their way of
life. When
circumstances change the entitlement might no longer be important in
that sense or decrease in its normative significance. For example, the
entitlement of original owners might weaken over time if they are
separated from the land. Having been separated from the land,
entitlement to the land might no longer be important for the original
owners autonomously realizing their way of life. Thus, generally
speaking, entitlements are sensitive to background circumstances and
they are vulnerable to prescription. As Waldron argues, property
entitlement is a set of claim rights, liberty rights and powers that
are “circumstantially
sensitive”.[51]

Further, if legitimate entitlement is sensitive to background changes,
it is possible that the ongoing effect of an illegitimate acquisition
and, more generally, of unjust violations of rights of others can
become legitimate when circumstances change. This is Waldron's
principal argument for the thesis that historical injustices may be
superseded.[52]
He gives an example in which the violation by one group of the
legitimate rights of another group to a given waterhole is superseded
by ecological catastrophe such that the interlopers acquire a right to
share what they had wrongly begun to use. In these circumstances,
“they are entitled to share that water hole. Their use of [the
waterhole] no longer counts as an injustice; it is now in fact part of
what justice now requires. The initial injustice by [the first group]
against [the second] has been superseded by circumstances” (Waldron
2004, 67). Hence justice may require that original owners of land
share their land with others and they may be required to share even
with those who unjustly appropriated the land.

However, even if supersession of injustice is possible, the claim
that it has occurred in any given situation “depends on which
circumstances are taken to be morally significant and how as a matter
of fact circumstances have changed” (Waldron 2004, 67). The argument
for the possibility of supersession rests on a hypothetical case of
ecological disaster such that the need of others to make use of the
resources was both extreme and brought about by circumstances beyond
their control.

One might doubt that these conditions are fully met even in cases of
so-called ancient historical
injustice.[53]
With respect to more recent injustices the conditions for their
supersession will often not be met (see Meyer 2007, 301-305).

So, we often should indeed attempt to counteract the negative
impact of past wrongs for the well-being of current and future
people. However, such an interpretation of the relevance of past
injustices is incomplete when understood as a statement of how we
ought to respond to the fact that past people were severely
wronged. That is true quite independently of whether or not we find in
a particular case of historical injustice that currently living people
have valid claims to reparations for being indirect victims of
historical injustice. Even if we held the view that the
non-identity-problem excluded the possibility of currently living
people being (indirect) victims of past injustice or that the historical
injustice under consideration has been superseded, we will not wish to
deny that past people were wronged. The moral significance of past
wrongs does not exclusively lie in their impact on present and future
people's well-being; rather, the significance of past wrongs is also
to be seen in the fact that past people were victims
of these injustices. We need to enquire into the question of what we
owe to the dead victims of past injustices. As sketched here, the
interpretation is misleading in suggesting that we owe them nothing
— that, in the words of Max Horkheimer, “[p]ast injuries
took place in the past and the matter ended there. The slain are truly
slain.”[54]

To many it is intuitively plausible that present generations can have
duties to dead victims owing to the wrongs committed against them (by
others) in the past. If this intuition can be defended, we have duties
to past generations that are grounded in past deeds. This would imply
that at least some aspects of historical injustice cannot be accounted
for by an historically informed theory of justice between
contemporaries (or between contemporaries and future people).

To attribute rights to dead people may seem unproblematic if we assume
that people continue to exist after their physical death and that they
may be affected by (and affect) events of this world. These
assumptions about the ontological status of previously living people
are, however, at least as controversial as their converse (see Mulgan
1999, 54-55). In the following discussion we will
proceed on the following assumption that might be said to occupy a sensible middle ground between the competing views:

(A) either the deceased do not exist (a1) or, if they do
exist, there is no connection between them and those currently alive
(a2).

In other words, we assume that upon her death any causal interaction
between a person and the physical world as we know it ceases.

Assuming that dead people cannot be bearers of interests or rights and
thus that those presently alive can neither harm nor wrong dead
people, Joel Feinberg and others have discussed two alternative
interpretations of posthumous harm. While both are compatible with
presupposition (A), neither of these positions provides a satisfactory
understanding of posthumous harm or wrong. According to the first
interpretation, present generations can be said to owe something to
surviving interests as such — that is, to interests that the
deceased had, while alive, with respect to future posthumous states of
affairs. However, while we have reasons to care about individual
people, it is not clear that we have reasons to care about interests
as such. According to the second (re-)interpretation (see Feinberg
1980b; Feinberg 1977, 301-02), the significance of posthumous events is
fully accounted for by the harm that these events cause a person
during her life. However, this interpretation is not an interpretation
of posthumous harm as such but of harm to living people that is caused
by posthumous events. This position has been shown to be incompatible
with our normal understanding of the significance of posthumous events
(see Gosseries 2004, ch. iv, sects. 4-5).

Contrary to the first position mentioned we will assume that deceased
people cannot be bearers of interests or rights, and contrary to the
second that we have no reason to care about interests that have no
current bearers. In contrast to the third position mentioned we do not
ask whether living people can be harmed by posthumous events. Rather,
we would like to find out whether present generations can be said to
owe something to dead people and, in particular, to those who were
victims of past injustices. A fourth position, the position of
surviving duties (see Wellman 1995, 155-57), is compatible
with presupposition (A) and does not rely on any of the criticized
views. According to this position, duties survive the death of the
bearer of the right (see note 1). While the bearer of the right no
longer exists, currently living people can stand under the correlative
duties. The notion of surviving duties relies on the idea that the
reasons for a person's right imply reasons for a correlative duty
under which other people may stand even after the death of the bearer
of the right. If it is a moral right, then these reasons will also
include general social reasons which are relevant not only for the
bearer of the right but also for the bearer(s) of the surviving duty,
his contemporaries (and future people). For example, we all have
reasons to protect people's trust that promises be kept and that
people have the reputation they deserve. The reasons for the surviving
duties also include the reasons that are necessary for showing that a
particular person had the moral right.

The position under consideration relies upon the following claims:
Some rights are future-oriented in the sense that they impose duties
in the future. Such rights can impose surviving duties; they imply
duties that are (also) binding after the death of the bearer of the
right if the appropriate bearer of the duty is identified. In the
following we will comment on these claims by investigating the reasons
for surviving duties with the help of an example of a person who
wishes to establish posthumously a prize for the sciences. Let us call
the person “Alfred Nobel” even though we make no claim
that the example resembles Alfred Nobel to whose bequest we owe the
Nobel Prize.

“A right implies a duty” means that a proposition about the right's
validity implies a proposition that some duty exists. Such an
implication relies upon the claim that the reasons for the right
contain (some of) the reasons for the duty. In the case of rights that
are future-oriented in the sense indicated, the reasons for the rights
of people while alive are sufficient for holding currently living
people under a duty, that is, a surviving duty. With respect to moral
rights, specifically moral reasons are among these reasons. Such
reasons are meant to protect the conditions of a, morally speaking,
valuable social life.

Suppose Alfred Nobel kept to himself his wish to establish,
posthumously, a prize for the sciences. Although he accumulated the
fortune necessary for such, Nobel neglected to write it in his will.
Hiking in isolated mountains together with his friend Barbara, Nobel
has an accident and both he and Barbara realize that he will die
before they can call on somebody for help. Nobel asks his friend to
promise him that she will make sure that his fortune will be spent for
the establishment of a prize for the sciences and that his wish to
this effect will be acknowledged as if it had been written in his
will.

Why should Barbara keep the promise? The particular strength of the
position under consideration is to be seen in its connecting the
surviving duty both to the previous right of the deceased person and
to those general moral reasons which are relevant for the bearer of
the duty and his contemporaries. First, the particular reasons which
ground the right of the no longer existing person imply reasons for
the validity of the surviving duty. Some of the reasons for a
currently living person to stand under the duty toward the deceased
person are implied by the reasons for attributing the corresponding
right to the deceased person while alive. This is also the sense in
which we stand under surviving duties toward the deceased
person. For example, the surviving duty to keep a death-bed promise is
valid for, inter alia, the reason that the promise was given
to the deceased person — and that is why the latter, while
alive, had a moral right that the promise given to him be kept. If the
duty is not understood to be binding due to the fact, inter
alia, that the deceased person had the future-oriented right,
surviving duties could not be distinguished from interpretations of,
for example, death-bed promises according to which the duty to keep
the promise is owed to our contemporaries alone (and possibly to
people living in the future). The position under consideration differs
from some consequentialist interpretations of such cases by insisting
that a surviving duty necessarily be based upon, inter alia,
the reasons for the future-oriented right and that these reasons
contain the specific reasons for the attribution of the previous right
to the deceased
person.[55]

So far we have investigated one type of reason for a person to stand
under a duty towards the deceased person. These reasons are implied by
the reasons for attributing the corresponding right to the deceased
person while alive. However, and second, there are other reasons
too. These reasons are general in that they concern the protection or
promotion of values important for the quality of social life. With
respect to death-bed promises, trust and the protection from betrayal,
are at stake. We all have reasons to protect the value of people
having confidence that promises be kept. In so far as people can and
do have an interest in future posthumous states of affairs of the
world, and in so far as pursuing such interests can be of high
importance to the well-being of people while alive (Meyer 2005, chs. 4
and 5), it is important for people that others can bind themselves by
promises or contracts to the effect that they will carry out certain
actions after the promisee's death, and that when others have done so,
that they can be confident that the promise will be kept. For the
practice of such promises, trust is of special importance, for the
promisee will not be able to determine whether the promise was
kept. Thus, the practice of such promises is particularly dependent
upon the protection of the value of people having confidence in
promises being kept. At the same time, if such promises have often not
been kept, this is likely to undermine the confidence in promises
being kept generally. The right of the deceased person that the
promise given will be kept is in part based on, among others, these
reasons. Although the right and the person who is the bearer of the
right have ceased to exist, the moral reasons for honoring the right
are still valid and the duty of the person who gave the promise
continues to be binding on the basis of these reasons. As these
reasons are general moral reasons they are not only relevant for the
individual bearer of the right but also for the surviving bearer of
the correlative duty and his contemporaries. The death of the bearer
of the right leaves these moral reasons unaffected, and the surviving
duty is based in part on these reasons in conjunction with the reasons
that are implied by the particular reasons for the attribution of the
correlative right to the deceased person while alive. Thus,
contemporaries of a person who stands under a surviving duty have
reason to impose sanctions on the person should he not keep his
promise.

One might wonder whether this interpretation of surviving duties is
compatible with the presupposition that dead people are bearers of
neither interests nor rights and that they cannot be affected by the
actions of present persons. At the very least, the position of
surviving duties we are defending presupposes the possibility of the
attribution of posthumous properties and, more particularly, of their
change — an assumption that can be shown to be rather
unproblematic (see Ruben 1988, 223-31).

Does the theory of surviving duties help us understand the moral
significance of the fact that past people were
severely wronged? We shall propose the idea that since people (as
members of ongoing societies) can be said to have an obligation to
compensate surviving and indirect victims of past injustices, they may
also have an obligation symbolically to compensate dead victims of
past injustices, people who cannot now be affected by our actions.

As argued above, we can stand under surviving duties toward past
people even though neither can we change the value to them of any
moment of their lives since they cannot be affected by what people do
after their death nor can they be thought to be bearers of interests
or rights. Until now we have discussed duties toward dead people with
reference to (variations on) the example of Alfred Nobel and his
bequest. Currently living people can act in ways that will
constitute a violation of the surviving duties under which they stand
owing to the rights the deceased once held. We stand under particular
surviving duties toward the deceased owing to their future-oriented
projects, the promises we made to them, or the contractual obligations
we entered into with them. However, not all people have the
opportunity or the wish to have a specific impact on posthumous states
of affairs. Not all people pursue projects that are future-oriented in
the relevant way and not all people oblige others to bring about what
for them are posthumous states of affairs. Here we want to suggest
that we can stand under surviving duties toward dead people owing to
the fact that they were victims of historical injustices. For us to
show that currently living people can stand under such duties, we will
have to assume that people generally have interests with respect to
posthumous states of affairs. Indeed, people can be thought generally
to be interested in enjoying a good reputation both during their
lifetime and posthumously. When people were violated in their rights,
and badly so, their posthumous reputation depends upon their being
publicly acknowledged as victims of these wrongs, and others being
identified as the wrongdoers.

In acknowledging past individuals as victims of egregious wrongs we
cannot affect their well-being. Also, such acknowledgement cannot be
expressed face to face with the dead victims, but only
vis-à-vis currently living people in light of the wrongs past
people suffered. However, if it is true that we stand under surviving
duties toward past victims of historical injustice owing to the wrongs
they suffered, then our fulfilling the duty by publicly acknowledging
the past injustices they suffered will change the relation between us
and the dead victims of historical injustice. It will be true of the
past victims of these injustices that they have the posthumous
property that we fulfilled our surviving duty toward them. To be sure,
a change of the relation between an existent person and a dead person
does not bring about a real change to the latter. Rather, the
relational change is based upon the real change of the person who
carries out the act.

For us to bring about public acknowledgment of past people as victims
of historical injustice can require different measures under different
circumstances. Currently living people can express their
acknowledgement of past people as victims of past wrongs in an
indirect way, namely, by providing compensation for those who are
worse off than they should be owing to the effects of the past
injustices suffered by their predecessors or by conferring benefits on
living people in whose well-being as members of a group we assume the
dead victims of past wrongs had an interest. The message of such
compensation can contain the acknowledgment that past people were
victims of past wrongs. Here I would like to suggest that we can
understand efforts at appropriate commemoration of past victims as
symbolic compensation and restitution.

Establishing a memorial is the typical course of action where the
effort is made to realize the symbolic value of compensating those
victims who are no longer living. A memorial may be a public speech, a
day in the official calendar, a conference, a public space or a
monument — for example, a sculpture or an installation. Often
these memorials are meant to commemorate crimes that previous members
committed in the name of a political society whose currently living
members now want to carry out actions of public symbolic compensation
or restitution for these crimes toward the victims and their
descendants. Such acts have been carried out since the 1970s in
Germany, and there is evidence of an international practice of
symbolic
compensation.[56]

How can we understand this practice of symbolic compensation? Here we
can only adumbrate the basic idea: the value of real compensation
— the rectification or compensation at which we would aim if
only it were possible — is imputed, at least in part, to the act
of symbolic compensation (see Nozick 1993, chs. 1 and 2). The
imputation of the value of real compensation to the acts of symbolic
compensation is partly based upon the expressive value of acts of
symbolic compensation. For those who carry out acts of symbolic
compensation these acts make it possible to express attitudes toward
the past victims — attitudes that are constitutive of acts of
compensation. Acts of symbolic compensation make it possible for us to
act in such a way as to express an understanding of ourselves as
people who wish to, and would, carry out acts of real compensation if
this were only possible. If successful we will have firmly expressed
an understanding of ourselves as persons who would provide real
compensation to the previously living person or people if this were
only possible. We will also have expressed a firm commitment to
prevent the repetition of such injustices.

Acts of symbolic compensation can thus be valuable for those who
perform them, since doing so helps express attitudes that are
important for their self-understanding and identity. Those involved
understand themselves to be persons committed to support the just
claims of those who have been injured and to be persons prepared to
contribute to the establishment and maintenance of a just political
society. This is a real consequence of such acts and can be of great
importance to those carrying out the
acts.[57]

However, we will not succeed in bringing about these consequences if
we aim to bring about these consequences as such. Carrying out
an act of symbolic value as a means of bringing about certain
consequences will change the character of the act and, thus, the
reasons that speak on behalf of carrying out the act in the first
place. It is not the case that we will become a person of a certain
identity simply by carrying out an act that a person of this identity
would have performed. While the consequences for self-understanding
just outlined can be an important factor in explaining why a person
acts as she does, in choosing what to do the person cannot herself
explicitly take into account this type of consequence without thereby
diminishing or undermining this very effect of her act.

Acts of symbolic compensation will have consequences for others as
well, particularly surviving and indirect victims of past injustices.
Acts of symbolic compensation can have consequences for such persons
and groups: the public acknowledgment of the suffering of past people
who were wronged by, say, a genocidal policy cannot be separated from
the acknowledgment of those who survived the same policy and
consequently continue to suffer, or from those who continue to suffer
as indirect victims of the policy. Those who carry out acts of
symbolic compensation will want to provide some real compensation to
those who currently suffer as a result of the same past wrongs, to
help those who currently are victims of similar injustices, and to
prevent such injustices from happening
again.[58]
The reasons for acts of symbolic compensation provide reasons for
real compensation where this is possible. Symbolic compensation
belongs to the measures likely to have the effect of providing
surviving victims or groups with assistance in recovering or regaining
membership and recognition in their respective societies, such that
they are once again able to lead lives under conditions of
justice.[59]

Symbolic compensation as understood here demonstrates that we can
recognize past people as victims of injustices without presupposing
that they can be current bearers of interests or rights. Insofar as
people while alive generally have an interest and a just claim to
enjoy the reputation they deserve, and insofar as the reasons for
their just claim can oblige us even after the bearer of the interest
and the just claim has ceased to exist, our carrying out acts of
symbolic compensation can be understood as fulfilling a surviving duty
toward dead people who were wronged in the past, namely the duty of
restoring to them the posthumous reputation they deserve. Our symbolic
compensation, if successful, will alter the relation in which we stand
to past victims without changing the subjective value of their own
lives. Such a change does not presuppose a real change in the past
people. Rather, the relational change is based upon real change of the
person who carries out the act. Bringing about this relational change
can be important for the self-understanding of the people who carry
out the acts. Carrying out acts of symbolic compensation can also have
positive consequences for, among others, surviving and indirect
victims of the injustice in question.

Present generations stand under two types of obligations of
intergenerational justice: They are obliged (i) not to violate the
rights of future generations (Section 2) and (ii) (at least some
presently living people might well be
obliged)[60]
to provide compensation to contemporaries with respect to harms victims in the past suffered at the hands of past perpetrators (Section 5). By employing a
threshold notion of harm understood as a central element
of a sufficientarian conception of intergenerational justice (Section 4)
we can justify conclusions about both types of present generations'
duties. The threshold notion of harm can be understood as a
constitutive element of an understanding of harm (disjunctive notion)
(Section 3, and, in particular, 3.4).

The special features of our relations to (remote) future people
— especially the lack of particular knowledge, the impossibility
of cooperation, and the permanent asymmetry of influence (Section 1)
— do not stand in the way of attributing rights to them that
ground corresponding duties owed by us (Sections 2 and 3). The fact
that past wrongs are among the necessary conditions for the existence
and identity of people currently alive is compatible with the view
that these persons have rights to compensation owing to the impact of
these past wrongs on their well-being, and that these rights can
ground corresponding duties owed by their contemporaries
(forward-looking understanding of the significance of past injustices)
(Section 5.1). Even when we allow for the possibility of the ongoing
impact of past injustices to be just today, namely owing to a change
of circumstances, we will have to investigate for each case the extent
to which the conditions for such a supersession of claims to
restitution or compensation are met (Section 5.2).

Rights-based considerations of intergenerational justice bear not only
upon “same people choices” but also upon both types of
“different people choices” that Parfit distinguishes,
including what he calls “different number choices”
(Sections 2 and 3). However, widely shared concerns for the
continuation of human life and at a high level of well-being cannot be
accounted for solely by rights-based considerations (Section
4.5). Also, the moral significance of past wrongs should not be
interpreted solely in terms of the impact of these injustices on
present and future people's well-being. If we allow that
intergenerational relations are not exclusively governed by duties
with correlative rights, the notion that we can stand under surviving
duties towards dead people who cannot be bearers of rights
vis-à-vis present people (Sections 5.3-4) is compatible with
the forward-looking understanding of the significance of historical
injustice. Also, the notion that we stand under an obligation towards
future people to which no rights of future people correspond —
namely, under the obligation not to destroy willfully the goods
inherited from our predecessors and the conditions that are
constitutive of persons' pursuit of future-oriented projects (Section
4.5) — is compatible with the view that we do stand under some
obligations of intergenerational justice to which the rights of future
people correspond.

Lamont, Julian, 1998, “A Solution to the Puzzle of When
Death Harms Its Victims”, Australasian Journal of
Philosophy, 76: 198-212.

Laslett, Peter, and James S. Fishkin (eds.), 1992, Justice
Between Age Groups and Generations, New Haven and London: Yale
University Press.

Lippert-Rasmussen, Kasper, 2007, “The Insignificance of the
Distinction Between Telic and Deontic Egalitarianism”, in
Egalitarianism. New Essays on the Nature and Value of
Equality, Nils Holtug and Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen (eds.),
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 101-124.

Lyons, David, 1977, “The New Indian Claims and Original
Rights to Land”, Social Theory and Practice, 4:
249-72.

Lyons, David, 2004, “Unfinished Business: Racial Junctures
in U.S. History and Their Legacy”, in Meyer 2004, 271-98.

Macklin, Ruth, 1981, “Can Future Generations Correctly Be
Said to Have Rights?”, in Partridge 1981, 151-56.

Young, James E., 1989, “The Texture of Memory: Holocaust
Memorials and Meaning”, in Remembering for the Future,
(Volume 1: Jews and Christians During and After the Holocaust),
Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1799-811.

Acknowledgments

For detailed comments and criticisms on a number of drafts I would
like to thank Thomas Pogge. For discussion of early drafts of most
sections I am grateful to Brian Barry and David Heyd. Rachel Brown edited my English and improved the presentation of the arguments in numerous ways. I would also like to
thank Brian Bix, Tony Daniel and Barbara Reiter.

For detailed and extremely helpful comments on the (2008) version of the entry I would like to thank Thomas Pogge. I would also like to thank James Nickel as well as Michael Edward Ravvin and Dominic Roser.

The SEP would like to congratulate the National Endowment for the Humanities on its 50th anniversary and express our indebtedness for the five generous grants it awarded our project from 1997 to 2007.
Readers who have benefited from the SEP are encouraged to examine the NEH’s anniversary page and, if inspired to do so, send a testimonial to neh50@neh.gov.